COS Innovations: Wide-Awake Surgery featuring Dr. Richard Bernstein

Video Transcript

How many times do you leave surgery laughing? Not very often. I’ve been a freelance photographer most of my life, I now teach full-time as well. I was having a trigger finger problem, the finger was locking up. I’ve been doing this wide-awake surgery for about five years. I feel very comfortable with it, have a lot of experience with this. The nice thing is that patients are in recovery for just a short period of time. Time in the recovery room is expensive. So, they’re happy about it because they get to go home, they get to go out have lunch. They don’t feel that post-operative nausea from some of the anesthetics. So, they’re really happy. One of the nice things is that I asked if I could bring something to distract myself like music or something like that or even a tablet to watch a movie and they said sure. So, I was actually watching an old Addams Family show cause I think they’re funny and silly. And he started singing the theme song while he was closing up my hand. And everybody else in the operating room started as well, so I was actually laughing.